Un Flic

Thur Jan 29
7:00

director:

Jean-Pierre Melville

cast:

Catherine Deneuve, Alain Delon, and Richard Crenna

Jean-Pierre Melville directed some of the best and most beloved films in French cinema: Army of Shadows, The Samurai, and The Red Circle. In Un Flic (The Cop), the director’s final film, we see a master at the peak of his powers. “Melville's crime films are best viewed as a heady combination of seeming realism and extreme stylization, and the sequence that opens Un Flic… is one of his best. The scene is St.-Jean-de-Monts, a French seaside town in the deserted dead of winter. An enormous American car, four hard men in soft hats inside, rolls down an empty street and stops near the only bright light in sight — a branch of the BNP (Bank Nationale de Paris). The skies open up, the rain pours down, the car's red taillights look spectacular against the blue haze, and the men head toward the bank, robbery on their mind.” (LA Times) Unlike the robbery films of today, Un Flic takes the time to study its characters and the work they do. The camera “dwells hypnotically upon the tiniest details of any operation, and punctuates the film with ominous, unexpected camera swoops. Seedy characters and expressionless settings are fused into a film noir demimonde, a world made dangerous by the edginess of Mr. Melville's methods.” (NY Times) A must-see for fans of Melville’s oeuvre.